A place to post guides, instructions and HOWTO documents on the use of SharpCap and Astrophotography in general

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For convenience, this is the abstract for the document included in the above post.

Abstract:
When capturing data using a raw colour space, such as RAW8 or RAW16, SharpCap (and other image capture programs) will display colour on the screen but saved files will appear to be monochrome and may display a grid pattern. Additional software is required to generate the colours – a process known as debayering. This document describes how to use the program PIPP, https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/ , to debayer single or multiple images.

no need to worry too much - the files you have saved from SharpCap will have the mono camera data in them (and it' will not have been modified before saving). At most there will be a flag in the capture file indicating that the data is RAW colour data which you may need to override when processing - ie tell your processing application to ignore the flag and not debayer the file.

Out of interest, what camera gave you the option of RAW16 for a mono camera? That shouldn't really happen and I'd like to fix that bug if possible.

Actually, I've asked a professional service to remove the Bayer array of a camera and hence I got a mono version of the camera. I didn't realise the colour space was "RAW16" while capturing. When I post-processed the lunar data, no matter I use PIPP or AutoStakkert (i.e. without debayer and force it to mono), chessboard still found in the images.

Today, I go through your manual again and repeat the setup process step by step. I found that the colour space option is limited to "Colour" mode only and no "Mono" options can be selected.

Now, I used the PIPP to debayer the data normally and then convert it back to Monochrome version in the "Processing Options" such that AutoStakkert can stack it nicely and no more chessboard found in the images. I don't know any drawback on these actions. Is there any suggestions on this issue?

Ah, OK, so the camera will identify itself as colour but is really mono because you have removed the bayer matrix - fixing the issue with PIPP is probably the best approach to processing and shouldn't loose any quality - you can tell PIPP to ignore the bayer pattern flag. In SharpCap you can try turning the 'Debayer Preview' option to 'Off' which will show the preview image in pure mono, but I think will still save the default RAW pattern flat to saved files.